


Beyond the Veil

by dracusfyre



Series: Winteriron Week [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Turned Into a Ghost, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Secret Admirer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-06-30 04:09:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19845283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dracusfyre/pseuds/dracusfyre
Summary: The Snap didn't kill half of all living things so much as move them a few feet left of reality. As the Snapped try to figure out what this means for them, Bucky starts gravitating towards a grieving Tony.For the Winteriron Week prompt "secret caretaking."





	Beyond the Veil

**Author's Note:**

> The premise was inspired by China Mieville's _The City & the City _.

Some days, Bucky couldn't decide if he was the ghost, or if Tony was.

On the one hand, clearly everyone on the other side thought that everyone on this side was dead; he had seen his face, Sam's, the kid's, and all the others with the big red letters underneath on the depressing slideshow that Tony watched late at night when everyone was asleep. On the other hand, between the two of them, Tony was the one that was ghosting around the Avengers compound looking pale and haunted, avoiding people in favor of locking himself away in the lab, barely eating and sleeping enough to keep himself functional. Bucky might only be visible to the other people who had been Snapped, but at least he was taking care of himself and taking regular trips to the city with Sam.

It wasn't just Tony, though; everyone on that side seemed lost, in their own ways. While Tony obsessed over hypothetical scenarios in his lab, spine bending lower and lower with each failure, Steve's shoulders seemed perpetually bowed by the unaccustomed weight of defeat. Meanwhile Natasha frantically spun her webs trying to keep everything together even as everyone else, one by one, eventually fled the oppressive silence of the compound until she and Tony were the only ones left. Well, the only ones left on _their_ side. On Bucky's side the compound felt downright crowded.   
  
_Maybe_ , Bucky thought, nudging a sandwich closer to Tony when he sighed and hung his head at the flashing red screens on his computer, _it wasn't_ that _they had lost, but_ what _they had lost._  
  
On that battlefield in Wakanda, after Thanos disappeared, Bucky remembered going dizzy, world spinning drunkenly around him. He remembered saying "Steve?" as he fell to his knees, burying his hands in the leaves and dirt of the forest floor and trying to ground himself against the strange disorientation that had come over him in a sickening wave. Once the queasiness had passed, he sat up to see Steve standing over him, looking shattered.   
  
"Bucky?" Steve had said, and Bucky had staggered to his feet saying "Steve, I'm here, I'm right here," but Steve didn't see him. Couldn't see him, he realized. Couldn't touch him, couldn't hear him. It was like something out of his nightmares, screaming himself hoarse trying to get someone, _anyone,_ to notice him. As Sam made his way through the thick ferns and underbrush towards him, Bucky realized with guilty relief that he wasn't the only one. Not only was Sam equally invisible to the team that was standing around them in shocked silence, but Bucky could hear other people in the distance trying to speak to their friends or teammates with increasing panic and dismay. Eventually, while the uncertain dead - or rather, the certainly disappeared - hovered anxiously, the rest of the team pulled themselves together, wordless and haggard, and eventually made their way back to the palace.

"What the hell happened?" Sam had asked Wanda once the reached the palace, where one group of very confused people stared at another group that was completely devastated, many crying while others stared blankly into space, as if the wound was so deep and sudden it hadn't started bleeding yet. "Wasn't Thanos supposed to kill half of everything? Did he win? Why are we still here?"  
  
"I don't know," T'Challa had answered when Wanda couldn't, still too full of grief for Vision to do anything but stare into space, tears streaming silently. His face was grim, jaw tight, as he watched Okoye try to bring order to the chaos that had engulfed the country. Queen Ramonda was still on that side, as Bucky had already started to think of it, helping her with a composure that was clearly hard fought judging from her red-rimmed eyes. "Something happened, but no one knows what. Yet."   
  
"My equipment registered an energy surge that was off the charts, like nothing I'd ever seen before," Shuri said dully, leaning heavily into T'Challa's side with his arm around her shoulders, seeming impossibly young as she watched her mother giving orders and speaking into her kimoyo beads, completely oblivious to her children standing right in front of her. "Then everything went back to normal, except for...this." She made a small, abortive gesture before wrapping her arms around herself again.

"I am Groot," the tree said, and Sam sighed with frustration.

"No one understands you, buddy," he said, then turned away as the tree muttered at him under its breath. "So what do we do now?" Even as Sam asked the question, Bucky recognized the extreme unfairness of it; T'Challa had no more answers than anyone else but already had half of his nation looking to him for guidance anyway. On the other side, Queen Ramonda waved away Steve's offer of help, so in the end the Avengers on that side flew to back to their headquarters without noticing all the people on this side that were with them on the plane.   
  
Three weeks into Bucky's baffling purgatory Tony had arrived, emaciated and almost dead. At first, Tony's righteous anger and the new arrivals managed to lift the depressed pall over everyone, inject some hope. But when Steve's Hail Mary mission failed, the spirit seemed to go out of everyone for good. While Bucky stayed at the compound, helplessly watching Natasha try to keep what they had left and Tony try to fix what they lost, Sam followed Steve out into the world, helping people on their side cope as Steve helped the people on his. In the meantime, the people on their side came to understand that they could still influence objects and events on the other side, but for some reason- perhaps the same weird sorcery that had divided them into sides in the first place- no one on the other side ever questioned it when objects appeared and disappeared when they weren't looking. They could drive cars and people would avoid them without knowing why, they could eat and shower and watch TV without anyone ever wondering why the water was running or the lights were on.   
  
They couldn't work automatic doors, though. Or take photos of themselves. Shuri periodically sent Bucky messages through his kimoyo beads with theories about the dual nature of light that didn't do much to explain it, but she, like Tony, was still trying.  
  
"Sorry, boss," Friday said into the silence, jarring Bucky from his thoughts. "Scenario failed."  
  
"Yeah, I see that." Tony rubbed his eyes, and his elbow hit the plate with the sandwich on it. With another sigh, he picked it up and took a bite out of it, saying "Open new scenario. We're going to tweak some variables and try again," around a mouthful of food, apparently never questioning why a sandwich had appeared next to him in the first place. Just like he hadn't questioned the spaghetti Bucky had made yesterday, or the grilled chicken the day before that, or the constant cups of coffee. _Ingrate,_ Bucky thought with a grim humor, but honestly it gave him a sense of satisfaction to know that he was helping, in his own small way, Tony try to undue what Thanos had done. 

Bucky watched as Tony absently finished off the whole sandwich, then he set a smoothie down next to the plate. Since his arrival, Tony had gained much of his weight back, though his long hours in the lab made his normally swarthy skin pallid and his eyes dull and tired. Bucky figured out how to trick him into eating, and could sometimes force him to go to sleep by turning off the electricity to the lab, but he hadn't figured out how to force him back into the world. Others had tried, other people that Tony could see like Ms. Potts and Colonel Rhodes, but eventually, like water running downhill, Tony would end up here, watching the slideshow of the lost. Inevitably, Bucky would join him, unable or unwilling to let him drive himself to exhaustion. 

"No one blames you," Bucky said to him, not for the first time. Sam had been telling him about subliminal messaging and Bucky figured it was worth a shot. "You shouldn't blame yourself so much. There was no way you could have made us ready for what was coming." As Tony stretched, stood, and made his way to the coffee pot, Bucky intercepted him and switched the coffee out for decaf. 

More blinking screens, more failed scenarios, and a bowl of soup later, Tony pulled up the photos again, like a wound he just couldn't let heal. "Is this what you saw, you two-bit sideshow magician?" he said to Stephen's photo, trading the coffee for whisky. "The only way we win is by failing?"

"Yes," Bucky answered. "He said it had to happen this way, and for what its worth, he's sorry." 

The next photo was the worst; sometimes Tony would linger on it, eyes flickering over the face like he was committing it to memory. In the beginning, when Stephen had arrived with the kid, Peter would come down here with Bucky, looking over Tony's shoulder and understanding way more about what he was doing than Bucky did. But eventually Bucky could see that it was too hard for him to see Tony grieving, so he gently suggested that Peter move on as best he could with his life in the city. "I'll watch over him," he promised. "He's going to figure this out." It took a couple of tries, but eventually he agreed, looking like it was as hard for him to leave as it was for him to stay.

"I'm sorry, kid," Tony said to the picture. He rested his head against the back of the chair as if the weight of it was too heavy for his his neck to hold. "I fucked up. I failed you. You deserved better."

"No, Tony. We failed you, not the other way around. We should have been there and that's because of me." Bucky stole his glass and took a swallow, and Tony didn't notice. No comment, not even the movement of his eyes registered what should have been a glass moving of its own accord. Not for the first time, or the last, Bucky wished he could reach out and touch Tony. Smooth away the ever deepening lines in his forehead and bracketing his mouth, brush the too-long hair away from his forehead, sit him down and carefully shave the stubble that darkened his jaw. Instead all he could do was make sure there was a steady stream of food at Tony's elbow and try not to feel like a dead man haunting the dying. He didn't like to think too much about why Tony had become so important to him; Sam had opinions, of course - transference, guilt, penance - but Bucky figured it was more about hope. Some people looked at Tony and thought that he had become obsessed with the past, but that was far from the truth. It took a special kind of hope and persistence to not accept the future as it appeared, but try to change it to what it could be. That's what Tony and by extension, Bucky, was obsessed with. 

"Alright, Friday," Tony said with a sigh. He had closed his eyes and for a second, the bags under his eyes seemed darker, the hollows in his cheeks deeper, and then he opened his eyes, lifted his head, and put his hands back on the keyboard. "Let's try this again." 


End file.
